1. Technical Field
The invention is a simple mechanical device employing the alignment tiny apertures made in a thin rectangular board (bearing the diagram) with apertures made in a paperboard-thin wheel attached behind the board (the wheel and board attached at their centers) when the wheel is turned at specific three-degree intervals, such as to display 103 different patterns of light flashing through the aligned apertures.
2. Background Art
In the area of education, methods of explaining and/or depicting the space around the nucleus of an atom have been limited to presenting the electron distribution occuring in the outer two or three subshells. While this presentation has been adequate for elements whose total number of electrons is no more than 10 and thus inhabit (in an unexcited state) only the innermost two shells (a three subshell maximum), for heavier atoms this method leaves out much information. For example, for the heavier elements (i.e., those with greater atomic numbers and thus larger numbers of electrons), information about the electron distribution in as many as 15 subshells (which can contain up to 94 electrons) is omitted or not easily conceptualized, when only the three outermost subshells are described.
Even when a comprehensive chart of the electron distributions is presented to the student of atomic physics (whether in highschool or at the university level), a chart with several rows and columns of numbers aids much less in the conceptualization of the space around an atom's nucleus than a comprehensive diagram which actually shows a sort of "stop action picture" of electrons lawfully inhabiting their proper places about the atom's nucleus.